Reinaldo Arenas

Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban poet, novelist, and playwright, best known as an outspoken critic of Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution, and the Cuban government. His fiction includes The Palace of the White Skunks, Farewell to the Sea, and Old Rosa, and his memoir Before Night Falls was dictated after he escaped to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boatlift and was published after his death. He killed himself in 1990 while dying of AIDS.